Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is a fault line in the book’s changing world order and, in the midst of war, a meeting ground for a plan to remake it. Its waters separate rival powers whose economic and cultural competition repeatedly threatens wider conflict, yet they also provide the secluded setting for negotiations intended to replace national governments with a global directorate.

A theater of interdependence and rivalry

The Pacific connects the political and economic struggles of the United States and China. The United States projects its influence through finance, industry, and culture; China, shaped in part by Russian social ideals but retaining its own cultural identity, develops its agriculture, railways, and industries while resisting that influence. Their rivalry is not simply a contest between distant states: it is a dispute over who will shape the organization and culture of a planet increasingly bound together by commerce.

The ocean also frames the economic pressures behind conflict. In a later crisis, newly workable fuel deposits in Antarctica lie beyond the jurisdiction of the World Fuel Control Board. The United States moves first to exploit them, while China demands international control, fearing the spread of United States influence. A world economy dependent on limited fuel turns a question of jurisdiction into a potential cause of war.

Rivalry becomes a trans-Pacific war

After a century of minor conflicts and strained peace following the Euro-American War, the United States and China grow increasingly antagonistic. Both populations have become more cosmopolitan in principle, but tribal loyalties remain ready to reassert themselves. The demand for fuel gives this latent hostility a concrete political object: China presses for the Antarctic deposits to be placed under common control, while the United States sees them as a means of advancement and of extending its influence. War eventually begins.

As the conflict continues, opposition to it develops on both sides of the ocean. Governments, whose survival has come to depend on war, distrust their own peace movements and even share intelligence about clandestine pacifist activity with their enemies. Against this background, representatives of business and labor decide that concerted action is needed to stop the fighting, though arranging a meeting between them is difficult.

The island meeting

In the twenty-sixth year of the war, two seaplanes approach an island in the Pacific Ocean at night, one from the East and one from the West, and land in a secluded inlet. Their passengers row ashore separately in rubber coracles and meet on the beach. The scene makes the ocean a threshold between opposing political worlds: the men arrive from opposite directions, and their contrasting dress signals different cultural identities. The Chinese envoy wears a sky-blue silk pyjama suit embroidered with golden dragons; the United States representative wears the grey coat and breeches associated with the business class of his country.

The meeting is private, but its intended consequences are planetary. The two men agree on practical measures: both national governments are to be overthrown simultaneously and replaced by a World Finance Directorate. The proposed body would include leading commercial and industrial figures alongside representatives of workers’ organizations. The United States representative is to become its first president, and the Chinese representative its first vice-president; the Directorate would oversee the economic reorganization of the world.

A setting of separation and connection

The island’s isolation enables representatives of two wartime powers to negotiate beyond the immediate reach of their governments, while the ocean’s scale gives their meeting its transnational character. The Pacific is not merely a barrier between the East and West: it is the route by which their envoys converge and the space across which a shared political decision is to be carried out.

The scene also folds distant time into its immediate setting. As the negotiators meet, the Moon glitters on the waves; the narration notes that in another age its shattered body will smother the equatorial region. The contrast places a fragile human attempt at global reconstruction against the larger, catastrophic history to come. The Pacific thus holds both the promise of political union and a reminder that even planetary arrangements remain exposed to forces beyond political control.